Each year, high school graduates from Ghana and Kenya prove their worth for scholarships and competence in the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Test), a required entrance exam to apply to schools, especially in the USA and Canada. For these students, it is a time to compete on the global scale and indeed each year’s SAT results have proven that some of these high school students attain scores that are in the top 5% in the world. The continuous excellence among these bright minds certainly provides room in Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Amherst, Williams, UPenn, and many other excellent academic communities.

In the 2018-2019 admission year, 56 Ghanaian and Kenyan students from various public and private high schools such as Christian High International (Ghana), Wesley Girls (Ghana), Brookhouse (Kenya), Strathmore (Kenya) and several others were admitted to some of the top universities such as Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, NYU, Columbia, Cornell, Smith College, Stanford, University of British Columbia among others on generous scholarships worth not less than $30,000 each year.

These students attribute their success to the assistance they received from AFEX Test Prep (an educational consulting company and test preparation centers in Kenya and Ghana). Such SAT preparation programs assist lots of students to go through the rather unfamiliar test with ease and come out with stellar results. The AFEX program, for example, in 2018, coached 11 of the students to obtain a perfect score in the Math section of the test. The program also produced one of the best scores in the Verbal section of 780 out of 800 that is part of the top 1% in the world.

With Africa set to be the most youthful continent in the world by 2030, this growing trend of our students securing the chance to world class education and exposure to different cultures from all over the world is a refreshing development for the future of the continent. It is the hope that these students will become the revolutionaries and the pioneers of the new and better Africa we expect to see in future. More importantly, this cohort of students will come back to the continent as skilled, transformative, and innovative leaders to help build Africa.